Learn how to bring the inside outside at Wicked Local U: Home

Monday

Apr 24, 2017 at 3:58 PMApr 25, 2017 at 8:45 PM

If you've ever wondered how to transform your boring backyard and gain more usable space in your home without adding to the main structure, stone masons and designers Dean & Derek may have just the answer in “The Outdoor Room,” their keynote presentation at the free Wicked Local U: Home at the Hampton Inn Boston in Natick on May 13.

R. Scott Reedy / for Wicked Local

If you’ve ever wondered how to transform your boring backyard and gain more usable space in your home without adding to the main structure, stone masons and designers Dean & Derek may have just the answer in “The Outdoor Room,” their keynote presentation at the free Wicked Local U: Home held at the Hampton Inn Boston in Natick on Saturday, May 13.

“Every room you have inside your home can be incorporated outside. So you can have kitchens, dining rooms, play rooms and even showers outside,” explains Derek Stearns, who, along with Dean Marsico, co-hosted “Rock Solid” and “Indoors Out” on cable television’s DIY Network.

“Some people love to cook so they install a grill or even a pizza oven outside. Other people just want to relax, so they go with a fire pit, maybe a bar, and space for some great outdoor furniture. There are a tremendous array of fabrics and products available for outdoor living today. The ‘outdoor room’ can be very simple or very elaborate.”

The same axiom could easily be applied to the professional pursuits of Marsico and Stearns. After growing up in Braintree, the cousins moved between show business and stone masonry before combining both.

Marsico was living in Los Angeles where, in the 1990s, he was cast in feature films such as “The Mod Squad” and TV movies including Disney’s “Balloon Farm.” Stearns found work in professional theater on the East Coast and in films while continuing to work part-time as a stone mason.

Returning home to Massachusetts 17 years ago, Marsico joined Stearns at Stearns Stoneworks. The pair had first learned masonry from Stearns’ father, the late Arthur F. Stearns, who founded his own eponymous masonry company in 1959.

“My father always used to say, ‘If you have a trade, you will always be able to pay your bills,’” recalled Stearns during a recent conference call with Marsico. And while the pair were back home on the South Shore, their respective brushes with fame inspired a new approach to their evolving careers.

They created two half-hour episodes of a do-it-yourself TV show they called “The Stone Guys,” which they submitted far and wide.

“Everyone called us back – to reject us,” Stearns says with a laugh and a bit of exaggeration, too. The Knoxville, Tenn.-based DIY Network liked the pilot episodes and signed the pair to co-host “Rock Solid,” a series showing how to increase the value of a home starting outside, which went on the air in 2005. That program, and a successor entitled “Indoors Out,” took Marsico and Stearns all over the United States to tape segments.

The TV personalities – who were also seen on PBS-TV’s “The Victory Garden” – never tired of inspiring viewers to tackle their own home improvement projects, but the travel was another story. After a dozen years on national television, Marsico, who now lives in Norwell with his family, and Stearns, who makes his home in Weymouth with his, decided it was time to turn away from the little red light on the camera.

“We’re no longer doing TV,” explains Marsico. “After more than 200 episodes and countless numbers of flights, it was time to move on. We still travel the country giving keynote speeches at trade shows like the annual World of Concrete, but we spend a lot less time in airports.”

“We enjoyed doing TV, we really did. And we saw the country, too. But none of it can compare to being home for dinner with our kids,” says Stearns. “It’s definitely time for the next phase of our lives.”

For Marsico and Stearns that means working much closer to home – as co-marketing managers for Plymouth Quarries, Inc., in Hingham.

“Growing up, we were always at Plymouth Quarries. My father was a yard man there in his 20s. On his lunch break, he would watch the men working in the quarries. He learned stone cutting here. It is because of my father’s history with Plymouth Quarries that Dean and I have the careers we have today,” says Stearns whose brother, Fox-25 sportscaster Butch Stearns, also learned stone masonry from Arthur Stearns.

Incorporated since 1915, Plymouth Quarries – chief supplier of unique stone for buildings at Yale University, Boston College, and Weymouth’s recently restored Fogg Library – is now owned by James and Mary Bristol, whose family-owned family of businesses includes J.F. Price Company, Bates Bros. Granite, Bristol Brothers Development and the Weathervane Companies, all of Hingham and Weymouth, and the Range Bar and Grille in Hingham.

“We’re no longer contractors and we’re no longer designing,” says Stearns. “Instead, we want to take the knowledge we have from working with architects and landscape architects to make Plymouth Quarries a one-stop resource center for everything in natural stone including landscape.”

And if their TV fame follows them, that will be just fine by Marsico and Stearns.

“It’s always very nice to be recognized by someone who has seen you on television,” says Marsico. “The greatest compliment we get, however, is from other stone masons who send us emails to say things like, ‘You guys are some of the only people out there who really know what you’re doing.’ They even say that they learned from us, which means a lot.”

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